What role did the Church play in the period during and after the fall of the
government of the Roman Empire in the West?

In what sense and why did Western Europe develop independently of the other
civilizations of the Old World?

Why was Western Europe not able to restore a government on the model of the
Roman Empire of the West?

What caused the disintegration of the empire that Charlemagne had
constructed?

In what ways was the 1000 a turning point in the history of Western Europe?

What were the classes and institutions that developed in medieval Europe,
and how did they work together?

TEXT

With the failure of the Eastern Romans to hold onto the reconquests of the
Emperor Justinian (527-565), Western Europe was left relatively isolated at the
far western end of the belt of civilizations. It was not heavily populated; it
lacked any rich sources of raw materials to trade; its artistic standards had
been declining for some time and the Germanic invasions had disrupted
manufacturing to such a degree that the West could offer very little in the way
of trade goods that would appeal to the sophisticated cultures to the East.
Consequently, it was largely ignored and was left to develop without much foreign
and advanced influences.

From 600 to about 900, Europe seemed to have been trying to reconstruct the old
Roman Empire of the West. The Church, which had become a branch of the Roman
imperial government in the course of the 300's, survived the collapse of the
political and military of the Roman Empire in the West. It tried to preserve
Roman imperial institutions and principles to the point where local bishops often
took over the authority and regalia of the old Roman provincial governors. It was
in the cathedrals and monasteries of the West that Roman learning was preserved
to the extent that it was in fact preserved. As influential as the Church might
have been however, it needed power to pursue its apparent goal of restoring the
Roman Empire. It acquired that power in about 750, when it allied itself with the
Franks, one of the most powerful of the Germanic peoples who had entered the
territory of the old Empire. Acting almost as partners, Frankish kings and their
ecclesiastical advisors and administrators began to try to central authority once
again, to repair the ruined western transport system, to organize the Church more
effectively, to conquer the lands that had comprised the Roman Empire in the West
and to convert their pagan inhabitants, to improve agriculture, and to encourage
the development of art, architecture, literature, and other cultural activities -
- always favoring the model and standards of the Roman Empire, of course.

The efforts were finally successful in the year 800, when the Frankish king,
Charles, was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day. The
rulers of Western Europe could at least claim that they had restored an
independent Roman Empire of the West, although the new empire was only
superficially like even the actual Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the reign of
Charles the Great, usually called Charlemagne (768-
814), represented a considerable recovery, and is often regarded as a
renaissance, or "rebirth" of Roman culture, by historians.

This happy situation did not last long. The Franks had the interesting custom of
dividing their estates equally among all of their children. So Frankish kings
would divide their kingdoms among their sons; the sons would soon be embroiled in
a civil war until one of them won out over the others and reunified the king; and
then he would die and the kingdom would be divided among his sons.
Charlemagne had been lucky that his brother had decided to abdicate and enter a
monastery, and all of Charlemagne's sons except Louis, his youngest, died before
their father. Louis (814-840), however, had three sons survive him, and the civil
war that broke out among them permanently divided the empire that Charlemagne had
built.

While Louis' sons were fighting among themselves, Western Europe was attacked
from all sides by a new wave of invaders, although these invaders tended to raid
and plunder more than conquer and settle. From Scandinavia came the
Vikings, sailing up and down the coasts of Europe and up its rivers
deep into its interior. They were pagans, fierce warriors, and quite bloody-
minded. For many years, it was common enough for priests to end their prayers
with the words ... and from the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, protect us.
Amen. There were also new invaders from central Asia, people calling
themselves Magyars, but called Huns by the inhabitants of
Western Europe. Riding swift ponies, they raided much of German, France and
northern Italy. Finally, the western Mediterranean Sea was dominated by the
Saracens, inhabitants of the North African coast who had converted
to the new (since 622) religion of Islam. The Saracens had seized
the islands of the Western Mediterranean and southern Italy, controlled the
access to Western Europe by sea, and engaged in almost continuous piratical
raids. It is interesting to note that they continued to function as pirates until
the early 1800, when the newly-independent United States attacked the Barbary
Coast and curbed its pirate fleets.

The nature of these hit-and-run attacks was such that no central government could
respond effectively, even if the rulers of the central governments had not been
engrossed in fighting each other. Local strong men built fortresses that offered
protection to the peasants in their locality, and these local
"bosses" took military and political power into their own hands. The Kingdom of
Germany disintegrated into a half dozen small states, while France collapsed into
something close to anarchy, with literally hundreds of local barons
each controlling the territory and the people around their
castles.

From about 900 to about 1000, Europe was fighting for its very existence and, in
the course of that struggle, developed new institutions and values that owed
relatively little to the old Roman Empire. The local rulers of the time were too
busy to engage in dreams of centralizing authority in a revived Roman Empire and
were generally content to adopt whatever seemed to work. Europe emerged from that
period with a society based upon three basic institutions. One was the local
ruler who exercised governmental powers, protected his people with a castle in
which they could take refuge in time of need, and defended them clad in armor and
riding to battle mounted on a war-horse. The second was the churchman, either
priest or monk, who represented a Church that was no longer interested in
functioning as a branch of an imperial government, but sought to be independent
of secular authority and to set the moral and ethical standards for Europe. The
third was the peasant, organized into village communities that functioned as
agricultural cooperatives, sharing the tasks of plowing and regarding the
surrounding meadows and forests as a common possession. Each of these supported
the other in important and even essential ways and, together, they were able to
produce a sufficient surplus of food to support a great number of warriors.

The year 1000 marked an amazing change in the fortunes of Western Europe. The
Vikings were converted to Christianity as were the Magyars, and their raids
ceased. The merchants ships of the city-states of northern Italy fought the
Saracen pirates and took control of the Western Mediterranean, and the trade
between the lands of the region of the Baltic Sea and the Byzantine Empire, which
had been moving along the rivers of Russia, now began to shift to Western Europe
and to stimulate the development of the economy of the region. Almost unnoticed,
several innovations in agricultural technology (the deep plow, the use of horses
as draft animals, crop rotation) led to an increase in peasant production and
productivity. This led to an increased population as well as a higher standard of
living and workers who could be diverted from agriculture to manufacture. All
this, in turn, led to an increase of wealth and -- at least potentially -- a
decrease in expenditures for defense. Western Europe began investing more of its
capital in education, research, technological development, and the arts.

Western Europe had, by now, more than recovered the wealth and population it had
lost with the Germanic invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the
West, and it had done so largely with its own resources. Inventions (such
gunpowder, the compass, the astrolabe, the making of paper) eventually filtered
in from the East, but these were not essential to what happened. Europe was
reaching the status of an advanced civilization, and was doing so without relying
on the labor of masses of slaves, without the direction and coordination of a
central government, and without infusions of foreign capital either through trade
or conquest. The Europeans were developing a civilization that was largely
independent of, and, in many ways, basically different from, the other
civilizations of the Old World.

ASSIGNMENTS

REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS

You
might wish to visit some site that will offer a view of the ways of life of the three
classes of Medieval Europe.
Castles on the Web will offer you a wide choice of the most imposing castles of Western
Europe to visit. Members of the Church feel into two major groups. The first were the
secular clergy, whose life centered on the cathedral. The site called
Gothic Dreams will give you a good
introduction to cathedrals. The second group were the monks, whose life centered on
monasteries. Maulbronn
Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage monument in Germany will show you one of the great
monasteries of the Middle Ages, one that has survived to the present day. Finally, we
should consider the peasants, although there is much less on the web about them than about
the nobles and clerics.
Laxton, however, is a medieval English manor that, somehow or another, escaped
modernization.

RECOMMENDED ASSIGNMENTS

There is a great deal of browsing that one might do.
The Age of King Charles V is a
sprawling site that provides a panorama of France in the fourteenth-century, as well as an
illustrated contemporary history of the kingdom.
A Tour of Amiens Cathedral
was one of the earliest big sites on the web, and it has continued to incorporate new
technology as it becomes available. It is well worth seeing, if only to get an idea of what
can be done within the present state of the art. There are numerous opportunities for
American students to join archaeological excavations in Europe during the summer. If you
are interested in such things,
Wharram
Village, in England is an example of a small site excavated in this fashion, while York, a city in northern
England has been extensively excavated, with most of the digging done by college students
like yourself.

This text was produced and installed by Lynn H. Nelson, Department of History,
University of Kansas. 14 February 1998 Lawrence KS